there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older
fish
what who nods at them and says morning boys how's the water and the two young
fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the
other and goes what the hell is water the point of the fish story is merely
that the most obvious important realities are often the ones that are
hardest to see and talk about stated as an English sentence of course this is
just a banal platitude but the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult
existence then all platitudes can have a life-or-death importance
the plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what
day in day out really needs there happened to be a whole large parts of
adult american life that nobody talks about instrumentals feature one such
part involves boredom routine and petty frustration the parents and older folks
here will know all too well what I'm talking about
by way of example let's say it's an average adult day you get up in the
morning go to your challenging white-collar college graduate job and
you work hard for eight or ten hours and at the end of the day you're tired and
somewhat stressed and all you wanted to go home and have a good supper and maybe
unwind for an hour and then hit the sack early because of course you have to get
up
and do it all again and you remember there's no food at home you haven't had
time to shop this week because you're challenging job and so now after work
you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket
it's the end of a workday and the traffic is apt to be very bad
so getting to the store takes way longer than it should and when you finally get
there the supermarket is very crowded because of courses the time of day when
all the other people with jobs to also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping
but you can't just get in and quickly out you have to wander all over the huge
over lit stores confusing miles to find the stuff you want and you have to
maneuver your junkie card through all these other tire curry people apart etc
that are cutting stuff out because it's one ceremony and eventually you get all
your supper supplies except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes
open even though it's the end of the day rush so the checkout line is incredibly
long which is stupid and infuriating but you can take your frustration out on the
frantic lady working the register who was overworked a job whose daily tedium
and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a
prestigious college but anyway you finally get to the checkout lines front
and pay for your food and get told to have a nice day in a voice that is the
absolute voice of death and then you have to take your creepy floozy plastic
bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that falls madly to the
left all the way out through the crowded bumpy litari parking lot and then you
have to drive all the way home to slow heavy SUV intensive rush hour traffic
etc etc
everyone here is done this of course but it hasn't yet been part of you graduates
actual life routine day after week after month after year but it will be
and many more dreary annoying seemingly meaningless routines besides but that is
not the point the point is that petty frustrating crap like this is exactly
where the work of choosing is going to come in because the traffic jams and
crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think and if I don't
make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to
we're going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop because my
natural developed studies certainty that situations like this are really all
about me about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home
and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way
and who are all these people in my way and look at how repulsive motion
tomorrow and how stupid and now like instead I'd and non-human they seem in
the checkout line or how annoying and rude it is that people are talking
loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line and look at how deeply
personally unfair to see if i choose to think this way in the store and on the
freeway fine lots of us do except thinking this way tends to be so easy
and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice it is my natural folks it's the
automatic way that I experienced the boring frustrating crowded parts of
adult life when I'm operating on the automatic unconscious belief that i am
the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings or what you
determine the world priority
the thing is that of course there are totally different ways to think about
these kinds of situations
in this traffic all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way
it's not impossible that some of these people and suvs have been horrible auto
accident you passed and now find driving so terrifying that this therapist is all
that ordered them to get a huge heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drop
or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone
else in the supermarket's checkout line just as bored as frustrated as I and
that some of these people probably have much harder for tedious painful lives
then I do again please don't think I'm giving moral advice or that I'm saying
you're supposed to think this way or that anyone expects you to just
automatically do it because it's hard it takes real and effort and if you are
like me some days you won't be able to do it or you just flat-out warranty but
most days if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice you can choose to look
differently at this fat that I / made up lady just screamed at her kid in the
checkout line maybe she's not usually like this
maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband is
dying from heat or maybe this very ladies the low-wage clerk the motor
vehicles department who just yesterday help your spouse resolve hrithik
infuriating red tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic
of course none of this is likely but it's also not impossible
it just depends what you want to consider if you're automatically sure
you know what reality is and what is really important if you want to operate
under default setting and you like me
probably won't consider possibilities that are annoying miserable but if you
really learn how to think how to pay attention then you'll know you have
other options
it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded hot slow consumer
health type situation has not only meaningful that sacred on fire with the
same force that with the Stars love fellowship the mystical oneness of all
things
not that mystical stuff necessarily true
the only thing that's capital T true is that you get to decide how you're going
to try to see it this I submit is freedom of real education of learning
how to be well-adjusted you get to consciously decide what has meaning and
what doesn't
that is real freedom that is being educated and understanding how to think
the alternative is unconscious the default setting the rat race the
constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing i know that the
stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way
a commencement speech is supposed to sound what it is as far as I can see is
the capital T truth with a whole lot of rhetorical nicety strip the way you are
of course free to think of it whatever you wish but please don't just dismiss
it as some finger-wagging dr. Laura sermon none of this stuff is really
about morality religion or Dogma or big fancy questions of life after death the
capital T truth is about life before death
it is about the real value of a real education which has almost nothing to do
with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness
awareness of what is so real and essential so hidden in plain sight all
around us all the time that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over
this is water